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As I write our ancient English freedoms have now been ended by Parliament as a result of the “Coronavirus Act” (aka the “Enabling Act”).

It is an old wisdom that if you ask any expert specialist, particularly a medical expert specialist, for their advice on how to keep safe, you will wind up with advice that focuses too much on the immediate problem and too little on your general welfare.

My own late father, when he was in his late 70’s developed cancer and was therefore given the standard recommendation of six doses of chemotherapy.

Anyone who has had cancer will know that with each dose of chemotherapy your general health is impacted more and more seriously.

By the fourth dose I said to my father that I thought he should not take any more. After all the prognosis on this cancer was one where, even if it came back it was sufficiently slow developing that he would probably have died of something else before it could get him.

My father, having been a good soldier was determined to carry on with the cancer specialist’s instructions and so he did complete the course of six chemotherapies. The impact on his health however, was so bad that the last one had leached the calcium out of his bones and as a result he had a collapsed vertebra, which left him in agony for the rest of his life.

Boris and the Government in their panic over the Chinese Virus (aka Corona Virus) has asked its medical experts and specialists for medical advice on what is best to do to keep the vulnerable safe. The all too predictable result has been that the medical experts have advised such a thorough Safety First policy, that the Government probably already crashed our economy by following it.

This is of course a drastic failure of political leadership. In this type of situation it is the job of politicians to balance the expert, specialist, medical advice with the need to keep the economy and society going.

It is worth remembering that so far as we can tell, all those who are under 65, unless they have underlying serious health conditions, are unlikely to be seriously affected by the Chinese Virus.

The more elderly, the more at risk people are. That is of course partly because the older you are the more underlying health issues you naturally acquire and the more fragile your health becomes.

People who are at risk should of course, on any sensible basis, consider taking precautions, however the rest of society which is not at much risk really should be carrying on as much as they can without unnecessarily putting those at risk at yet greater risk. That would have been the sensible approach.

What we have seen instead are wild panic measures for a disease which may well be far less dangerous than would have called for such measures.

Our political system, as it currently stands, seems to select far too many people for high office who prove to be incompetent once appointed. This inherent political incompetence, combined with wildly irresponsible, hysterical scare-mongering by our wholly unprofessional mainstream media, seems, yet again, to be creating a policy disaster.

The excessive “Safety First” type of thinking on a much more minor scale has become all too prevalent in the Health and Safety “Precautionary Principle” based thinking of officialdom.

There is of course no true “safety” for any of us. As Archbishop Cranmer’s Funeral Service in the Book of Common Prayer, rather gloomily, puts it:-

“Man, that is born of woman, hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.

In the midst of life we are in death; of whom may we seek for succour, but of thee, O Lord, who for our sins art justly displeased?”

The commentator Peter Hitchins has written as follows in his article: “Is shutting down Britain – with unprecedented curbs on ancient liberties – REALLY the best answer?

“In a pungent letter to The Times last week, a leading vet, Dick Sibley, cast doubt on the brilliance of the Imperial College scientists, saying that his heart sank when he learned they were advising the Government. Calling them a ‘team of doom-mongers’, he said their advice on the 2001 foot-and-mouth outbreak ‘led to what I believe to be the unnecessary slaughter of millions of healthy cattle and sheep’ until they were overruled by the then Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir David King.

He added: ‘I hope that Boris Johnson, Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance show similar wisdom. They must ensure that measures are proportionate, balanced and practical.’

Avoidable deaths are tragic, but each year there are already many deaths, especially among the old, from complications of flu leading to pneumonia.

The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) tells me that the number of flu cases and deaths due to flu-related complications in England alone averages 17,000 a year. This varies greatly each winter, ranging from 1,692 deaths last season (2018/19) to 28,330 deaths in 2014/15.

The DHSC notes that many of those who die from these diseases have underlying health conditions, as do almost all the victims of coronavirus so far, here and elsewhere. As the experienced and knowledgeable doctor who writes under the pseudonym ‘MD’ in the Left-wing magazine Private Eye wrote at the start of the panic: ‘In the winter of 2017-18, more than 50,000 excess deaths occurred in England and Wales, largely unnoticed.’

Nor is it just respiratory diseases that carry people off too soon. In the Government’s table of ‘deaths considered avoidable’, it lists 31,307 deaths from cardiovascular diseases in England and Wales for 2013, the last year for which they could give me figures.

This, largely the toll of unhealthy lifestyles, was out of a total of 114,740 ‘avoidable’ deaths in that year. To put all these figures in perspective, please note that every human being in the United Kingdom suffers from a fatal condition – being alive.

About 1,600 people die every day in the UK for one reason or another. A similar figure applies in Italy and a much larger one in China. The coronavirus deaths, while distressing and shocking, are not so numerous as to require the civilised world to shut down transport and commerce, nor to surrender centuries-old liberties in an afternoon.

We are warned of supposedly devastating death rates. But at least one expert, John Ioannidis, is not so sure. He is Professor of Medicine, of epidemiology and population health, of biomedical data science, and of statistics at Stanford University in California. He says the data are utterly unreliable because so many cases are going unrecorded.

He warns: ‘This evidence fiasco creates tremendous uncertainty about the risk of dying from Covid-19. Reported case fatality rates, like the official 3.4 per cent rate from the World Health Organisation, cause horror and are meaningless.’ In only one place – aboard the cruise ship Diamond Princess – has an entire closed community been available for study. And the death rate there – just one per cent – is distorted because so many of those aboard were elderly. The real rate, adjusted for a wide age range, could be as low as 0.05 per cent and as high as one per cent.

As Prof Ioannidis says: ‘That huge range markedly affects how severe the pandemic is and what should be done. A population-wide case fatality rate of 0.05 per cent is lower than seasonal influenza. If that is the true rate, locking down the world with potentially tremendous social and financial consequences may be totally irrational. It’s like an elephant being attacked by a house cat. Frustrated and trying to avoid the cat, the elephant accidentally jumps off a cliff and dies.’

The former editor of The Times, Sir Simon Jenkins, recently listed these unfulfilled scares: bird flu did not kill the predicted millions in 1997. In 1999 it was Mad Cow Disease and its human variant, vCJD, which was predicted to kill half a million. Fewer than 200 in fact died from it in the UK.

The first Sars outbreak of 2003 was reported as having ‘a 25 per cent chance of killing tens of millions’ and being ‘worse than Aids’. In 2006, another bout of bird flu was declared ‘the first pandemic of the 21st Century’.

There were similar warnings in 2009, that swine flu could kill 65,000. It did not. The Council of Europe described the hyping of the 2009 pandemic as ‘one of the great medical scandals of the century’. Well, we shall no doubt see.”

THE RISKS OF RELYING TOO MUCH ON MEDICAL EXPERT'S ADVICE